


Asafoetida and Mustard Seeds

by nimblermortal



Category: Emelan - Tamora Pierce
Genre: Baking, Cooking, Fluff, Food, M/M, flirting with food
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-11
Updated: 2018-05-11
Packaged: 2019-05-05 03:38:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,010
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14608458
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nimblermortal/pseuds/nimblermortal
Summary: One of the dedicates who routinely visit Winding Circle visits Gorse's kitchen. Gorse finds himself with a man who likes to cook and likes to eat.





	Asafoetida and Mustard Seeds

**Author's Note:**

  * For [kupopopoyo](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kupopopoyo/gifts).



Let’s just get this clear now: He’s not a mage.

He’s not _not_ a mage either. He just… knows where things are. There will never be an apprentice who can hide a measuring cup where Gorse can’t find it. There will never be a body that leaves his kitchen hungry. He swore that long ago.

As a child, his parents wanted him to be a harrier. He could find criminals, they said. He could help people. And he liked helping people; but his talent was useless. It wasn’t real magic, couldn’t be purified or trained; it only worked in places he was familiar with; it only worked when he was near.

So he found other things. The right amount of rosemary to add to shortbread. The length of time to keep a bowl of water in the oven with the bread. A part-time job as a teenager, the money from which he used to buy flour. The way to Winding Circle, where everyone was a foreigner, and there were a thousand recipes to learn, and no one spoke with his mother’s confusion over pronouns. And, inevitably, he thrived.

That was when he got a reputation as a mage: when he beat out the cooking mages in his rise through the kitchen ranks. So he must have been magic, because he never forgot the soup in his eagerness to try a new spell. Because he wanted to _do something_ with his life, like all the other young people, but what he wanted to do was feed hungry people.

He liked hungry people. They were simple needs, easy to fill; he liked watching their faces changed, liked learning their palates and catering to them until they, too, believed he was magic. He liked the sorcery of leaving them wondering. And, like many people, he liked some more than others.

He liked the ones who showed up with their mouths full of stories from distant lands, the savor on their tongues changing the words in their mouths. He liked the ones who showed up looking around them too often, noticing more than they should know to. He liked the ones who showed up hungry, looking for something to fill a belly that wasn’t used to being full, and the surprise on their faces when it was something they recognized.

Visiting Dedicate Hing was a shoe-in for Gorse’s favorites. He was shy but he knew what he wanted, and what he wanted was a puffy rice cake like one of the thin pancakes that were getting relatively popular, but flavored with, oh, what was it called, it sometimes went in sausages and was good for calming the stomach.

“Fennel,” said Gorse, displacing a bewildered apprentice. “Idli. Sit here for a bit.”

“It’s no trouble if you haven’t got it,” said Hing. “I wouldn’t want you to spend all that time grinding rice…”

“That’s what apprentices are for,” said Gorse. “I haven’t got idli, but I can fry you up a pan of okra in the time it takes to tell me where you came from.”

What he wanted was for Hing to tell him about street food, not the cayenne-and-mustard-seed crispy okra dish that Gorse knew but the julienned okra with lime juice and the crispy samosas you had to juggle before you could eat.

“And what brings you here?” asked Gorse, expecting an answer about the divination mirrors or whassisname’s glass plant house.

“Well,” said Hing, “I like bread.”

Gorse stopped everything to look at him.

“I tried the white stuff first and that was all right,” said Hing, “but then I got on to the darker breads. Dense and rich and full of flavor, covered in oats and seeds, as many grains as you can think of, and then with those lovely dark dried fruits in them sometimes… and nuts! But the fruits, I can never remember their names, like peaches but dark…?”

“Plums,” said Gorse. “Prunes, when they’re dried.”

“Yes! Why do they have two names?”

“Nearly everything does,” said Gorse, quietly grabbing a basket and stuffing it with muesli muffins. “But if you came here for multigrain bread, why did you ask me for idli?”

“A man can get homesick,” said Hing. “I heard a rumor that there was a chef at Winding Circle who could make nearly anything.”

Gorse raised his eyebrows. “Try me tomorrow,” he said. “See if I can’t make your okra, at least. And I’ll teach you how to bake. If you’ve got time, of course.”

“Well, I did come to see the ovens,” said Hing.

 

Hing was a fire dedicate, and technically there to tour the forges and talk to Skyfire about strategy and politics and the way armies were moving. Practically, he was there to show up in Gorse’s kitchen and tell him that he had to wait for the mustard seeds to get hotter, until they were popping out of the pan. He used his magic to heat the pan and show Gorse, and swore when he got the milk too hot when he was demonstrating how to froth it.

He was the most distracting man Gorse had ever met. One apprentice got the kitchen door open on her way out before Gorse managed to stop her and add a few buns and some cilantro to her shopping basket. When he came back, Hing was looking at him oddly.

“What?” asked Gorse. “You’re going to let that milk burn.”

“I think you’re the biggest-hearted man I’ve met,” said Hing.

“It’s the height,” said Gorse, “and the clogging arteries.”

“I have never seen you eat more than one bite of your own cinnamon buns,” said Hing.

“But I taste everything that goes into them,” said Gorse. Hing leaned forward. “What is it?” asked Gorse.

“Nothing,” said Hing, leaning back again. “Did you want to try the frothing again?”

A moment ago, Gorse would have laughed about how much milk he’d spilled into the dirt. Now he shook his head and leaned forward himself until he could feel Hing’s breath on his face, until Hing got over himself and kissed Gorse’s cheek.

“You smell like milk,” said Gorse, smiling as he sat back.

“You taste like cinnamon,” said Hing, and busied himself shifting pots about in a way Gorse knew was aimless. So Gorse touched his shoulder, and kissed his lips, not pressing, he hoped, just making himself clear. He saw Hing’s eyes close in appreciation.

Well, he wasn’t the first man Gorse had kissed in this kitchen.

“I thought you didn’t… like me,” said Hing when Gorse had finished making his point.

Gorse snorted. “You’re a visitor, and I let you cook in my kitchen, on my _own stove_ , and you thought I didn’t _like_ you?”

“Like me like that, then,” said Hing, and paused for a moment to run over the sentence and make sure it made sense. “I thought you Summer Sea people were just… demonstrative.”

Gorse shrugged. “Well, I would _like_ to make you breakfast biscuits, but I’m a gentleman, so I’ll make you dinner first. Several dinners,” he added, raising a finger when Hing looked alarmed at the rate at which this was escalating.

 

It was a lovely summer. Just having someone to pass a whisk to when a stranger entered the kitchen, and knowing no apprentice was going to burn the roux. But having someone who put a hand on the small of Gorse’s back when walking behind him… Gorse was used to and appreciated a brusque “Coming behind you with a knife,” (or hot pan, or delicate tray, or…) but the intimacy of the kitchen, of Hing’s touch, was lovely.

He was always behind Hing in demonstrating affection.

It was Hing, after all, who invented the game of sneaking a kiss as if that was how he meant to discover what Gorse had been cooking; Hing who found ways to kiss the back of Gorse’s neck while he was bent over something; Hing who dragged Gorse out to the gardens some times to see where the herbs he knew were growing.

All Gorse knew to do was open up his life, his kitchen, as fully as he could. And the intimacy of knowing, of _cooking_ with someone, of feeling not just where they were - because Gorse always knew where people were - but that they knew where he was, and moved seamlessly around him without either saying a word - or trading words over busy shoulders -

And the words.

One night, Hing dragged his mother’s tongue out of Gorse. A few ragged words and then, staggering into the night slowly and then more fluidly, all the vocabulary Gorse remembered and never used. Hing _listened_ to it. Gorse had had no idea how much he missed that, had not realized it until he was crying into Hing’s shoulder because this was the language that told him he was loved.

Hing rubbed his back, and let the notes of the language hang in the air for a few moments, and then whispered back in an atrocious accent, “I am not hungry.”

Gorse chuckled, helpless and confused, against Hing’s side. “What did you say?” he asked.

“I am not hungry,” Hing repeated, and then switched to the language of the Summer Sea. “I never learned to speak it; it did me no good, my accent was so terrible. But I did learn to understand what people were saying about me. If that helps.”

“I…” said Gorse helplessly. “I am going to make you that spiced tea the way you had it at home, with frothed milk, and coffee in a tiny cup, and dosai with podi, and -“

“You don’t have to cook me anything,” said Hing. “I can cook for myself.”

Gorse did not know how to tell him how beautiful that was, that there was no necessity between them, that everything came as surplus, as more than could be looked for, a cup running over with liqueur, the last touch of garlic to a balsamic dressing. Lying in bed with someone who was also used to an oven’s heat, and didn’t mind touch on a summer night.

 

By the end of summer, Hing would take the knife from Gorse the moment he saw Gorse look toward the kitchen door in _that way_. No word needed to be said; Gorse was going to feed people, and Hing would hold the station.

But the summer did end. Hing went home. They said goodbye after the early morning baked goods had gone into the oven, in the quiet part of morning where there was a breath before the dishes needed to be done.

“You’ll send me letters?” Gorse asked at last.

“You could come with me,” said Hing. Gorse looked back over his shoulder.

“My kitchen is here,” he said. “You could… stay?”

“I’ll send you apprentices,” Hing promised. “I will sing you the best, most well-trained apprentices…”

“You aren’t even a chef,” Gorse told him. “You’re a traveler, and - and a smith or something, I never did understand what you were doing here.”

“Magic stuff,” said Hing loftily. “With books and theory. You would never understand.”

“Excuses,” Gorse laughed. “You never needed them before.”

Hing shrugged, and his eyes went from dancing to solemn again. “I will be back,” he promised.

“And I will visit you,” Gorse promised, surprising himself. “It’s… I can leave my kitchen, sometimes. For a few months. To travel.”

“Then I’ll see you,” Hing agreed. And there was silence, and the growing awareness that they had done their hugging, their touching, and if Hing did not leave now they would do it all again, and if Gorse were to say one thing he might destroy it all - might make Hing stay, even, at the cost of all Hing was now, that whole spun sugar structure of _not needing_ …

And Hing turned, and walked away across the garden.

 

But there was, not so long afterward, in the space between their two kitchens, a travel pan warming over a camp fire, and waiting the full time it took mustard seeds to pop.

**Author's Note:**

> Hing is another word for asafoetida, which, with mustard seeds and urad daal, form the basis for Tamil cooking. As such, a legitimate name for a Winding Circle (or visiting) dedicate!
> 
> My thanks to Kupo for complaining that there were only five m/m fics in the Emelan fandom on AO3. If you have any questions about the food, hit me up on tumblr under the same name and I'll update the notes accordingly!


End file.
